Dieu est né en exil
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| Author | Vintilă Horia |
|---|---|
| Original title | Dieu est né en exil |
| Translator | A. Lytton Sells |
| Country | France |
| Language | French |
| Publisher | Fayard |
| Released | 1960 |
| Released in English | 1961 |
Dieu est né en exil ("God was born in exile") is a novel written by Vintilă Horia, for which he was awarded the prestigious Prix Goncourt, though he never received this prize.
The novel's narrator is Ovid, the Roman poet, and this apocryphal work is rather similar to Marguerite Yourcenar's Mémoires d'Hadrien in which Yourcenar writes the Roman emperor Hadrian's mémoires.
In Dieu est né en exil, "Ovid" covers the last eight years of his life, when he was exiled to Tomis, an Ancient Roman colony in Scythia Minor. This novel adopts the form of a diary, divided into eight chapters (each of which corresponds to a year of exile) that reveal the steps of a progressive "maturation," or a conversion of sorts.
The novel's universe is linked together around a primordial axis whose two poles are Roman society and the Dacian world, respectively. This dichotomy generates a rich range of metaphors, but perhaps this novel's most important attribute is the way in which both worlds are constructed, and their importance as "chronotopes" in the narrative. Ovid's spiritual journey resolves itself between both symbolic universes whose antagonistic characters become interwoven during a chiasm, in order to rise up again at the end of the radically metamorphized narration.
[edit] See also
- Ovid, the novel's narrator.
- Mémoires d'Hadrien
